


Led By This Clue He Traveled Over The Sky

by akathecentimetre



Series: A Gentleman's Agreement [7]
Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Fae & Fairies, Family, Found Family, Holidays, Honeymoon, M/M, Oban - Freeform, Scotland, Shetland Islands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-26
Updated: 2017-10-26
Packaged: 2019-01-22 21:26:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12491188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akathecentimetre/pseuds/akathecentimetre
Summary: With the millennium coming on, Thomas puts up with Abdul's incomprehensible need to commune with nature on the Shetland Islands at midsummer - family dinners, footballs, and a visit from some voyeuristic fae ensue.





	Led By This Clue He Traveled Over The Sky

**Author's Note:**

> This is just pure fluff from beginning to end, with hardly any magic - and, weirdly, hardly any dialogue. Oh well.

*

**Midsummer, 1999**

The idea of taking a holiday hadn’t exactly been on their minds that summer, nor was there much likelihood that it would come to pass even if it had.

In the end, it was a confluence of occurrences which led to them heading northwards in the third weekend of June. Abdul’s birthday, earlier in the year, had planted, Thomas knew, a host of thoughts in both of them about being forty-something and the general sense of passing time; it had been an extremely busy year at UCH, through which Abdul had worked like a dog; Thomas, with the millennium approaching, felt the looming uncertainty of his future in a new century like it was a ghost, and a constant companion. Molly, meanwhile, sensing all of this from both of them, had gotten more and more generally irritated in the first few months of the year, and, when it came to May and Thomas found himself treated to one too many cups of overbrewed, painfully bitter cups of morning coffee from her kitchen, it dawned on him that perhaps they were all due a bit of a break.

Their chosen destination being Scotland was sprung on him a bit, and even when they set off he had to confess it wasn’t exactly his idea of a pleasant one. He had contemplated the Continent, but found himself shrinking back from it when he was challenged with organizing such a trip, and the spectre of what memories would creep up upon him; the colonies were no less daunting a proposition, and a far more expensive one too. Cornwall held its attractions in summertime, as did the prospect of exploring, for the first time in decades, the monuments to Arthur – but Abdul started dropping hints, once he had put in for leave, that it had been nearly eighteen months since he had properly seen his own family, and once the idea was planted it was determinedly followed up on, with mischievous nudges and reminders, until Thomas suddenly found he had agreed not only to a week’s walking holiday in the Shetland Islands, but to meeting Abdul’s family in Oban beforehand.

He put his foot down about the walking – Abdul would have to indulge in his incomprehensible need to commune with nature in hiking boots alone – but otherwise, it was to Oban they were to go.

Getting up at five in the morning to begin their journey was made bearable by the fact that midsummer’s eve was less than a week away, and glorious sun and heat followed them up the M6 for much of that first Sunday. It was immediately apparent, in the sight of Abdul leaning back in the passenger seat and taking in the landscape with his window partway open, and in the vicarious pleasure Thomas took in watching him when he wasn’t watching the road, that whatever their destination this had been a much-needed and very good idea. He thought briefly of Molly, partway through the day, and was happy to imagine her putting her feet up in a very quiet house – or perhaps hunting mice, which she was sometimes wont to do – and very much not regretting their absence.

Oban was bustling when they finally pulled into its small streets, with Abdul directing him towards the northern edge of the town; the local residents were clearly still in their Sunday best, the churches no doubt having been heaving that morning, and Thomas couldn’t help but wonder what, exactly, he was expecting to find, or how he was to be received.

He had asked Abdul about it in bits and pieces over the years, and more seriously recently, and gotten a fair amount of fond exasperation in return. “All loyal sons and daughters of the Kirk,” Abdul had laughed, apparently meaning multiple things with that one phrase. “Good family folk. Nothing for you to be frightened of.”

What that meant, in more detail, was a mother and a sister, Christine, still living at home and spending most of their time volunteering with the local branch of the Scottish Women’s Institutes – Abdul didn’t say anything about sending part of what, relatively, had to be his stupendous London salary north to support them, but Thomas assumed that had to be the case – and a younger brother, Graham, who had done the expected in becoming an accountant, leaving home to find a wife, and propagating three sons all currently below the age of thirteen.

Said children were already bouncing off of the walls in anticipation of novel guests when they arrived and managed to park in front of the traditional row-house in which all the Wilsons were waiting. Thomas found himself surprised, when confronted by the whole loud, cheerful, straightforwardly welcoming bunch of them, that here, so far away from London, Abdul wasn’t an odd one out in any way; Christine and Graham, who sized Thomas up instantly and clearly thought he was no threat, were both as lean and ginger-haired as their sibling, and Abdul himself was no less the family man as his nephews excitedly demanded that he tell them all about his most recent and most disgusting surgeries.

Mrs. Wilson, reigning over all, was quieter, and there were distinguished streaks of white in her hair. It was her scrutiny Thomas was most worried about – if worry was even the right word, because he knew there was some part of himself held in reserve which wouldn’t give a damn about anyone’s disapproval at this stage of his life – but she gave him no outward sign, as Christine, Graham, and his wife Isobel went efficiently about the task of preparing a Sunday roast in the cluttered kitchen, that he was being thought of as anything more or less than a friend of her son’s, brought up out of that eccentric and distant land that lay south of the border. Pleasantries were exchanged, commiserations about the length of the journey sympathized with, and before long, the children managed to drag Abdul out into the back garden for a kickabout – which (as far as Thomas could tell as he watched through the sitting room window) meant that, given his height, Abdul essentially just had to stand still and have footballs launched at him at astonishing speed. The middle boy, in particular, looked like he was aiming to be scouted for a professional club as he wheeled away to celebrate scoring a direct hit on his uncle’s ear.

“Go on, then,” Thomas heard, and he turned to find Mrs. Wilson at his elbow, holding out one of two small drams of what had to be pre-dinner whiskey, keeping the other for herself. “Get that down yourself. It’ll warm you up.”

“Thank you,” Thomas said, hoping he sounded as grateful as he felt, and briefly lifted it to toast her before taking his first sip. “Have I been subjected to the lot of you, then?”

His guess paid off, as her sharp face cracked into a smile; she was enough of a matriarch to be fondly fed up with the lot of them. Her expression reminded him very much of Abdul’s, then, as she visibly let him in on her secret.

“All but Mr. Wilson,” she said, in answer to his question. “He’s in care up at NHS Highland. Stroke, so they say. Mind and legs never quite came back, and we didn’t have the space nor expertise to keep him proper here.”

“I’m so sorry to hear it.”

“Abdul did nae mention it, then?” she asked, and gave him a rueful smile as he murmured not. “Can’t say I’m surprised. Stubborn dads don’t make for the most welcoming of homecomings.”

“You don’t share his feelings, I gather. I know Abdul’s grateful for that.”

“Aye, well,” she said, with a touch of conspiracy in her dancing eyes, “I’ll still pray for his redemption on Sundays. But what I think’s not what matters, is it?”

The anticipated meal followed, once Abdul had managed to fight his way back inside with the children swinging from every one of his limbs. It had been a long time since Thomas had been at a dinner before which grace was spoken – Abdul linked hands with him and his sister, but, smiling, did not join them in saying amen – and longer still since he had experienced the true chaos, even in the strictest of families, which was the struggle to get anyone below the age of fifteen to eat their vegetables. Half of the conversation – spoken quickly enough that the plethora of Highland accents degenerated into words he couldn’t possibly understand – completely passed him by, and so he just focused on how he could tell that Abdul was amused by, and dearly loved, every one of them simply by the look on his face. The rest of the evening passed in a similar fashion, though the adults managed to sequester themselves off with drinks and tea around eight, and Thomas, his sensibilities finally provoked, had no compunction about chasing down the seven-year-old who had decided it was a brilliant idea to whack both his brothers and any conveniently-placed item of furniture with the silver head of his staff and warning that he could summon all sorts of creatures who would do great harm if it were touched again.

The next morning was far quieter, with only Mrs. Wilson and Christine in the house, and the hours passed quickly over newspapers and coffee before they had to be off; Thomas waited at the Jag while Abdul said his farewells, and took as a victory, and all he really needed, Mrs. Wilson’s smile at him from the doorway, and the nod she gave him before she disappeared inside.

It was to be a full day’s worth of travel to Shetland, with a five-hour drive east and north across Scotland to Aberdeen followed by an overnight ferry to Lerwick on the islands. Being that it was Scotland, it rained for most of both journeys, and was a brisk 11 degrees when they drove the Jag off onto the dock the next morning. Thomas couldn’t resist a couple of jibes about how Abdul had to have been regretting the masochistic streak which apparently made him want to freeze to death in summer, but it didn’t seem to do much to dent his enthusiasm as Thomas left him at the neat pile of stones on top of a nearby hill that was the Broch of Clickimin, and he set off, with a wave, down the coastal path as Thomas turned the car around and went in search of a man he hadn’t seen for forty years.

Alistair Smith hadn’t been in war, and it showed. Not that that wasn’t a good thing, of course, but it was still startling, after the years Thomas had spent vaguely watching practitioner after distant practitioner decline into their own personal hellish twilights, and seeing them end up under Abdul’s scalpel, to come across a man who had not only avoided all of that grief but had managed to thrive afterwards. Smith was about eighty now, and had been in his twenties then, but instead of being sent overseas he had been placed in Shetland to make sure there was someone who could conjure a half-decent werelight about if the Germans had ever gotten it into their heads to invade. (It hadn’t been such an odd idea, either, considering both what had happened to the Channel Islands, and the community of Norwegian refugees and their ships that had been living in Lunna at the time.) Smith, having been sent north from a rather more comfortable and upper-class existence in Edinburgh, had clearly taken to the task with relish considering he had never left again.

“An honor,” he kept saying, cheerfully beaming; he was tall and broad beneath his thick thatch of white hair, a picture of health, and his accent was so poshly and consciously pseudo-English that Thomas refrained from laughing (good-naturedly) at him only with difficulty. “A real honor to have you here, Master Nightingale. I can’t remember the last time there’s been another practitioner on Shetland.”

“I can’t say I’m surprised, though it is charming,” Thomas nodded; they were sitting across from each other in a traditionally perfect pub next to the water in Scalloway, so he didn’t feel like it would be polite to say otherwise. “Have you had much to contend with since you were decommissioned?”

“Contend with, no,” Smith said thoughtfully, his eyes twinkling. “Unless you count the grandchildren. We’re a long way from the magical salons and classrooms of Edinburgh, but we have our strange comings and goings, naturally. When I got your letter I spent some time combing through my notebooks and found your usual smattering of faerie courts, lights on the beaches, objects going missing because the local dwarves are rebuilding – the locals know I’m the odd duck they can talk to about these things.

“But,” he added, rummaging briefly in a satchel he’d brought with him, “if you’d like to know more – and if you’d do me the honor – I’ve been working up my remembrances into a book, of sorts. You might find it helpful, if you’re planning to stay long in the islands.”

“I can’t say I am,” Thomas admitted, accepting the proffered stack of pages, covered in neat lines of typewritten ink and the title SCOTICA FABULAE. “My partner’s gotten it into his head that he wants to break his neck on one of the cliffs, but I have little desire to go out chasing sprites.”

He’d spoken without thinking, but the look he got from Smith in return was the same sort of pleasant surprise he’d received from others in London, or from Abdul’s family: a slight moment of recalculation, followed by the unexpected, but not unwelcome, pulse of happiness for the luck even of a relative stranger.

“Aye, I imagine you’ve had enough adventures,” Smith said, and then he grinned, and burst into a big-hearted laugh, and launched into his next story, a deeply complicated tale of how he had apparently warned off a skulking German submarine in 1942, which sounded akin to something out of _The Russians Are Coming_ and kept them both occupied until the afternoon was drawing on and Thomas, despite himself, found that he was unwilling, for the first time in quite a while, to let go of times past.

He arrived at the B&B in Gulberwick shortly after five to find that Abdul, who had planned to take the most wandering route he could find, had beaten him both to getting cleaned up and to dinner, and was sitting, half-asleep, next to the fireplace in the rambling farmhouse’s restaurant with the demolished remnants of a vegetable pie at his elbow. It was the most Thomas could do to get him upstairs to bed, where he found Abdul’s damp rucksack at the foot of a charming four-poster furnished with linens which both looked and smelled like the Fifties.

“I’m too old for this,” Abdul groaned the next morning over their breakfast. “It feels like I’ve got rocks in my calves.”

“Does that ailment have a scientific name?” Thomas asked innocently, and hurriedly put his head down to better enjoy his porridge.

Abdul got his revenge that evening, when, after a day in which Thomas read most of the _Scotica Fabulae_ in a café in Lerwick and enjoyed some delicious fruits of the season in the shape of freshly-caught North Sea cod, he drove south to Easter Quarff to find that Abdul had, at some point in the day, managed to slip and fall into what looked like had been a combination of a mudslide and a conglomeration of sheep-pats. His mood, however, was clearly undaunted as he clambered over the fence nearest to the hotel from the footpath, came over to where Thomas was waiting by the Jag, and gave him an enthusiastic hug, loudly extolling the virtues of nature.

Thomas debated sending him the future bill for cleaning what had been some very expensive Harris tweed, but eventually decided against it in the interest of keeping the Queen’s peace. Besides – it was hard to argue with this version of Abdul, tired and energetic and happy all at once, nor with how he looked at Thomas once he had managed to sluice the evidence of the outdoors off of him and came back downstairs to be clucked over by their host, an outgoing middle-aged woman who seemed to like nothing more than mothering her guests.

The next day was Midsummer’s Eve, though it didn’t much feel like it, with the morning being cold and grey. They were to meet that evening in a village called Aithsetter, where Abdul had managed to find a house, down what he euphemistically called a ‘track,’ that they could stay in for two nights and watch the solstice from. It seemed as good a day as any for Thomas to do some exploring of his own, and so he spent much of the long, bright afternoon putting the Jag through its paces on the winding roads of the island, thrilling to each sudden dip or unexpectedly blind curve, and admiring, somewhat despite himself, every view of valleys and rocky, untamed beaches.

The air thankfully cleared as it drew towards night, and he shut the car door around seven outside the bungalow to find the sky still bright, streaked with orange and yellow, with hours of light still to go. Both punctual as ever, he turned to see Abdul making his way down the track towards him just a few minutes later, and this time he was taking no chances.

“No,” he said sternly as Abdul approached, grinning broadly, flush with the exercise and up to his knees again in crusted mud. “Don’t you even consider it.”

“It’d do you good,” Abdul laughed, but he relented, and only slung his knapsack into the house’s front corridor before he went off around the corner to scrape off his boots and himself at the water spigot in the scrubby garden while Thomas went about opening up the house’s windows and rooms.

He was loth to call himself a romantic man, but Thomas couldn’t deny, when it was nearly ten and the sky was still pink and there was an enormous, honey-colored moon rising above the sea, that it was hard to imagine a better place to be than sitting on the rickety bench placed outside the bungalow’s back door with a half-empty glass of wine in one hand and Abdul, sitting sideways with his bare feet up, under his other arm.

“Yellow moon,” Abdul said, with a hint of melody, like it was a line from a song – “Oh, now ain’t you a friend of mine.” He paused, leaning more firmly back into Thomas. “Neville Brothers.”

“I wasn’t wondering.”

“I know. I just felt like telling you. Someday I’ll convince you to enjoy a bit of soul funk.” He turned his head sideways to press a kiss to Thomas’s wrist, and then shifted slightly. “Anything of interest in Smith’s manuscript?”

“Your usual collection of fae and creatures,” Thomas said, idly thinking that he was taking rather more than physical comfort from the fact that Abdul was warm against him, in contrast to the chilled air. “Possibly some selkies out your ways. Walter Scott had rather more fanciful notions, of course – beacons in the night visited by ghosts, and what not.”

“Given that it’s the Johnsmas festival, I doubt we’ll be visited by anything other than the living,” Abdul said dryly, his point proven by the little fleet of cars that were driving by on the road above them, blasting music that could never have been attractive to an early modern spirit. “I’m for indoors,” he added then, quieter. “Coming?”

“Not before you’re washed.”

“Prig,” Abdul said cheerfully, and gave him a deep, searching kiss before heading inside to start filling the bath.

Thomas stayed outside a little longer, true to his word, wondering just how far away the ocean, which he could hear crashing down the hill, really was. It was dim and darkening at ground level, finally – and as he stood to look off towards the shore, there was a bobbing yellow light in the gloom, reflecting off of waves and foam.

 _Hm_ , he thought, and took a few steps closer, curious, though not wanting to wander away from the safety of the house. There were other lights, now, joining the first, whirling in circles as though participating in some Shakespearean midsummer dance, and the shapes of unknown bodies flitted in and out of the shadows they cast onto the distant strip of white sand.

Thomas looked down into his wineglass, finished what was left in it in one go, and then went back into the bungalow, shutting the door very firmly behind him.

“Had enough?” Abdul called; he was still in the bath, and grinned out over the rim as Thomas put his glass down in the kitchen and came through to lean against the doorjamb. “Finally defeated by the Scottish weather?”

“Scotland’s putting on a show,” Thomas smiled. “Scott might have been more right than I assumed about sprites and their lanterns. “

“Really?” Abdul asked, and sat upright, dripping. “Shall I come out and see?”

“No,” Thomas said, coming into the bathroom and putting a hand on Abdul’s shoulder. “If I’m to be tempted into disaster, I’ll take this bit of Scotland over theirs.”

It had sounded silly in his head, but he felt the truth of his words keenly when Abdul reached up to slide a hand around his neck and pull him in to be kissed, and more sharply still when, not particularly caring that he got the edges of his rolled-up sleeve wet, he reached down into the water and Abdul twitched up into his touch, his breath quick against Thomas’s cheek.

“Wait,” Abdul groaned not long after, and though Thomas could only regret being interrupted it was certainly in the best interests of better to come as Abdul got out and grabbed a towel to dry himself. It was a quick trip after that to the bedroom, where, to his astonishment, Thomas saw that the floating lights from the beach appeared to have made their way up to the bungalow, because the glow of them was flitting outside the shutters, sending yellow beams shooting across the carpet.

Abdul looked at him, wide-eyed and not a little amused, as he sat on the edge of the bed and Thomas stepped out of his shoes. “Are we being visited by Titania?”

“I don’t think so – I thought she had retired to the Sherwood, but I can ask Oberon when we get back to London.”

“What?” Abdul said vaguely, but he didn’t wait for an answer as he pulled Thomas astride him and went to work on his shirt buttons.

Thomas could have sworn he heard giggling creeping in towards them at one point, but he was rather too engrossed in every part of Abdul being warmly and tightly clasped around every part of him to care.

The pleasure of a lie-in on a summer’s morning was one he hadn’t indulged in for a long time. It proved to be everything he had been missing, with the sounds of waves making their clear and crisp way up to them and Abdul dozing against his side. He even, in a moment of madness, allowed himself to be persuaded to finally take a walk through the thick grass down to the shoreline – though it threatened to ruin a fine pair of Oxfords – and found, watching Abdul wander ahead of him looking for any left-behind evidence of the faeries, that perhaps the right choice of partner could make even rambling worthwhile.

Abdul looked back at him, having given up on his search with nary a sooty lantern found. “You look serious. Glad you came?”

“Very,” Thomas nodded, reaching forward to take Abdul’s hand.

He didn’t say that he had been indeed been thinking of very serious things – about the body he worshipped and would be loving and faithful unto, and the worldly goods he wanted to endow, and about the little draft of calligraphed text he was just starting to write in his head.

 _I, Thomas Nightingale, being of sound mind and body_ , it began – but then Abdul kissed him, and smiled, and started to lead him back to the house, and he quieted those thoughts for now. The present demanded his attention, and he had learned never to ignore its call.

*

**Author's Note:**

> Here's [Yellow Moon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O87iUDZGDKs), which I kind of adore. If Thomas laughing at Smith's accent sounds odd, I dare y'all not to enjoy Stephen Fry's [explication of posh Scottish accents](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AQafwx3h7A) (I laugh like a drain every. Single. Time). Title from Samuel Bowden's _On the new method of treating physic_ (1726).
> 
> I am once again out of plot bunnies, and going into an extremely busy month - dissertating, NaNo, and travel, oh my! - so it may be a while before I update this series again. Do please feel free to leave me any prompts that you would fancy seeing, and thank you SO MUCH for reading!


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